This paper presents the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) proposal to MPEG-4 video coding standardization activity. The proposed technique is based on a novel approach to audio-visual data compression entitled dynamic coding. The newly born multimedia environment supports a plethora of applications which cannot be covered adequately by a single compression technique. Dynamic coding offers the opportunity to combine several compression techniques and segmentation strategies. Given a particular application, these two degrees of freedom can be constrained and assembled in order to produce a particular profile which meets the set of specifications dictated by the application. The basic principles of this approach are presented together with the data representation system. The major characteristics of dynamic coding are reviewed, along with simulation results showing the performance of such an approach in a very low bit-rate video coding environment.